The future’s suddenly a lot brighter for Nokia, argues Matt Warman

From the moment Nokia decided to use Microsoft’s mobile phone platform and nothing else, its purchase by the Windows-maker was inevitable. The company that once held 40pc of the global mobile phone market was doomed to be swallowed up by a firm with – at that time – little experience of making decent mobiles.

Some might think this is a sad decline, but it’s in reality a move that makes prime strategic sense for Microsoft. Nokia’s strength is not in taking on Samsung or Apple – it remains in the developing world where $10 handsets with the Nokia brand will forge loyal relationships for much more lucrative decades to come. If a Nokia is your first feature phone, and the company can keep pace, it has a good chance of following you for life as you upgrade. In the West, Nokia failed utterly to keep that pace, but across Africa it remains to some extent aspirational. So for many, Windows Phone may yet therefore become the default operating system. Microsoft has made a great purchase, for a bargain price.

It’s easy to be nostalgic for the Nokia of old – those with a sentimental bent will be glad it was bought by Microsoft rather than a Far Eastern manufacturer such as Huawei or Lenovo. But perhaps it makes more sense to be contemptuous: this is a company that utterly failed to see the prospects for its own business after the iPhone came out, and was so slow and lumbering it never launched a true competitor. Before Stephen Elop, a Microsoft veteran, was appointed chief executive, it never deserved to compete, and its feeble products meant it deserved to fall as low as it did.

While a cynic would argue that Elop has been complicit in running the company into the ground, allowing Microsoft to pick it up for a bargain price, in fact his ability to ensure its survival deserves serious praise.

And now Microsoft owns the whole mobile phone-making process: like Apple, software and hardware can be fully united. When he made his famous leap from a ‘burning platform’ into the arms of his former employer, Elop had no other options. He was right to see that Microsoft’s mobile bet was too big for it to be allowed to fail.

He will now take on a new role running Microsoft devices in a company that for the first time may yet be able to at the very least take over where BlackBerry is leaving off.

And already, there are encouraging signs: Nokia’s latest phones are superb devices and their market share is growing rapidly, albeit from a small base. The build quality is as good if not better than ever. And many users are tiring of having the same phone as all their friends: as technology becomes as much about fashion and taste as it is about functionality, there’s never been a better time for a resurgent Nokia to present a new, and viable option. With Microsoft’s backing, it may even succeed.